A bold nautical star design filled with the stripes and canton of the American flag, with black shaded points, shown as a flash drawing rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

American flag nautical star design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A five-pointed star drawn as a flat design, with each point filled by red and white stripes and a blue canton holding white stars. Black shaded segments split the star into facets, giving it a bold, graphic outline typical of traditional nautical flash. The image is centred on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Traditional Star American flag Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the Marguerite rounds the north skerry the wind has dropped to nothing, and from the slipway you can count the figures on her deck. You count them twice, the way your father taught you to count rope and hooks and lamp oil, and the second time there is one fewer than there should be. Someone is sitting down where someone should be standing.

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Hal Penhale jumps the gap onto the steps before the line is made fast. He does not look at you. He holds out an oilskin packet tied with tarred twine, no bigger than a ship's biscuit tin, and says that Tom wanted it brought to Ada, and that he is sorry about the cold. Inside is a chart of the Western Approaches, gone soft as cloth from handling, with a five-pointed star inked in one corner. Its points are striped red and white like the halyards, and the top left quarter is a blue field of tiny white stars. Tom must have drawn it at the chart table through the long nights. Along one edge, in pencil, he has written: Keep this bearing. I will find the way back.

You fold the chart along its old creases and carry it up the hill past the chapel and the shop with its lunchtime shutter. The gorse is out. Ada is at the washing line with her back to the sea, pegging a shirt that is not Tom's, and she turns when she hears your boots on the gravel. She does not ask you anything. You hold the chart up between you like a lantern.

You tell her he said to keep the bearing. She takes the packet, runs her thumb along the blue corner, and then she sits down on the upturned bucket by the wall, as if she has always known the shape of the news. Below you, the Marguerite comes in on the last of the light, with one fewer voice calling the lines.